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Last Light: Antarctica
Last Light: Antarctica is a series of photographic works
shot in early spring of 2006 when I travelled to the Ross Sea region of
Antarctica for two weeks with the Artists to Antarctica program
sponsored by Creative New Zealand and Antarctica New Zealand. I arrived
one hundred years after the first Antarctic explorers headed off to the
South Pole and the centennial celebrations only seemed to me to
underline the shallowness, the brevity and the utter inconsequentiality
of the colonial project in Antarctica.
The Antarctica I found was an alien icescape—savage and
primordial—completely devoid of human objects, huge and oblivious but also
replete with signs of fragility, stress and potential collapse. The
photographs are at once epic in scale and antiheroic in their attention
to the cracks, crevasses, glacier faces and pressure ridges which
emerge, collapse and re-form in a rhythm tied to global climate systems
that are in turn linked to our own systems of consumption. They point to
a dark irony in the growing consensus that while efforts at colonizing
Antarctica throughout the twentieth century barely dented its icy
surface, our collective addiction to fossil fuels, acting incrementally
and from afar, has gnawed deeply into the ice structures that cover the
continent. The resulting unintended effect is antiheroic, grimy,
disintegrative and potentially cataclysmic.
My photographs borrow their gothic sublime aesthetic from nineteenth
century romantic landscape painting and do so to point out a troubling
shift in the human relationship to landscape. Edmund Burke regarded
sublime nature as awesome, overwhelming, humbling and simultaneously
invigorating in its offer of mortality glimpsed but not actualised. The
21st century viewer has an altogether more disturbing relationship to
the mountain, the thrashing ocean, the crevasse and the glacier. Now we
look at Nature askance and with guilt, aware that its grandeur has
become somewhat sullied by our modernity and privilege. What I hope to
reinvigorate with this work is the sense of terror that lies at the
heart of the sublime response. The large size of the prints gestures to
the massiveness and immersive quality of an earlier notion of the
sublime. The sense of personal crisis at the center of this former
sublime has expanded to include all of humanity. Now when we approach
the crevasse we no longer approach the possibility of our mortality
alone, but rather that of our species and potentially our biosphere.
This is such a terrifying idea that it fails to confer the rewards of
the sublime: it does not invigorate. We look askance because we cannot
bear to look nature in the face. My hope with this work is to invite
that direct look and to mobilize the terror it should provoke.
Polar Gothic
Last Light employs techniques of the past to chart
contemporary phenomena that will have enormous effects on our collective
future. The daguerreotype is an exquisite technique in which the
photographic image floats on the mirrored surface of a highly polished
silver plate. I used this technique to document signs in the ice:
fissures, flaws, pressure ridges and a screaming ice ghoul, a harbinger
that confronted me high in an icefall as I descended though a white out.
The daguerreotype requires a direct, physical imprint of light on
chemicals on plate that cannot be manipulated or faked through
post-processing. In a time of digitized mediation, the daguerreotype
offers analog proof of place: it is a sign and witness to the
continent's immanence and of its ruin. The daguerreotype was
essentially outmoded by the mid-nineteenth century invention of silver
halide emulsion. Because its decline preceded Antarctic exploration, it
is a mode of representation that has never been practiced on that
continent. In having done so now, I hope to draw my audience into a
conversation about modernity and obsolescence and the evidentiary role
of photography. Through these anachronistic artefacts I am inviting my
audience to invest physically in Antarctica, a place of unrivalled
importance and unfathomable strangeness that most of us will never visit
but which all of us continuously undermine. The intervention of the
"Polar Gothic" into the seemingly tame and managed modern Antarctica of
science is a revival of an earlier era's close relation to terror, but
also an embodying of the evil of global warming, which in a change on
the daguerreotype's obsolete force, opens up the volitional aspect of
ice, or the way Antarctica reveals itself as a
terrifying—and damaged—landscape.
The Dry Valleys and the Futility of the Colonial Effort
On our final weekend in Antarctica our group was flown by helicopter
to the Dry Valleys. It was a huge privilege to be taken there, but I was
overwhelmed by the trip. It was not until we returned to the base that
evening that I began to make sense of why I had found the dry valleys so
frightening and why the visit had left me feeling so bereft.
I had walked through one of the most lifeless environments on earth.
There was no liquid water and very little ice. The temperature was
around thirty degrees C below zero. The stone strewn ground had been
worn down by the action of wind over centuries until it resembled a
polished tiled surface. I saw no insects, no moss, no algae, nothing
green of any kind. There was very little in the way of bacteria. Nothing
in this environment could decay. We were admonished not to leave the
tiniest scrap of food behind because any remnants of our visit would
remain, intact and unconsumed for the next several hundred years. The
valleys are littered with the frozen remains of penguins and seals that
wandered off course to their deaths hundreds of years ago and have
remained there, unchanged, ever since.
There is life in the dry valleys, in the form of nematodes and
primitive lichens, but it takes a very trained eye and often the help of
a microscope to spot it. It is the kind of primitive, hardy life we
might, in moments of great optimism, hope to find on a planet like Mars.
And it is in the dry valleys that JPL technicians have found an ideal
environment to test-drive their mars rovers, the advance guard in a
widely fantasized post-global wave of colonization.
What became utterly clear to me during my visit to the Dry Valleys
was the futility of that brand new colonial effort and the essential
interdependence of climate and life. We could not have survived more
than two hours on that frozen desolate plane without the great stacks of
survival gear unloaded with us and we will not survive anywhere else. We
will learn to live here or we will die, all of us together. It is not a
sublime thought. It is so ugly it can hardly be thought at all.
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